Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Artistic Consumption Log, Dec. 24, 2012 - Dec. 30, 2012

NEW YORK—Happy New Year, everybody! I hope you all had a good one!

I suppose I should make a New Year's resolution to do a better job of keeping up with these weekly artistic consumption logs—and heck, even this whole blog in general—than I've done in the past couple of months or so. But I'm pretty sure that is a resolution that I will eventually break. I'll try my damnedest, however!

Anyway, my highlights of this particular week in artistic consumption came courtesy of that German-American Romantic Ernst Lubitsch—Ninotchka especially (having Greta Garbo at the top of her form as well as Billy Wilder's endlessly witty and layered dialogue sure helps, apparently). Just about everything you want to know about what interests me in cinema, as in life—specifically, the intersection between cold logic and warm emotion, and the ways both intersect and enrich each other—can be seen in this 1939 comic masterpiece.

Ninotchka (1939)

Films

★ The Shop Around the Corner (1940, Ernst Lubitsch), seen on Turner Classic Movies at home in East Brunswick, N.J.
★Ninotchka (1939, Ernst Lubitsch), seen at Film Forum in New York Django Unchained(2012, Quentin Tarantino), seen at AMC Bridgewater Commons in Bridgewater, N.J. [second viewing]

★ Keep the Lights On(2012, Ira Sachs), seen via screener link at home in Brooklyn, N.Y.
★ Detropia (2012, Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady), seen at IFC Center in New York

2 comments:

Eh. As someone who prefers seeing movies in theaters whenever possible, I suppose I'd go with Ninotchka at Film Forum...but both movies themselves are pretty great, so I don't necessarily prefer one over the other.

About Me

By day, I'm a news assistant at The Wall Street Journal. By night, I'm a cinephile, (nonprofessional) film critic and general seeker of all that is intellectually and viscerally stimulating in life and art.